In his small-mindedness and lack of aspiration, Trump
curiously resembles Putin, though the origins of the two men’s stubborn
mediocrity could not be more different. Aspiration should not be
confused with ambition—both men want to be ever more powerful and
wealthier, but neither wants to be or even appear better. (One way in
which Putin continuously reasserts his lack of aspiration is by making
crude jokes at the most inappropriate times—as when, during a joint
appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2013, he compared EU
monetary policy to a wedding night: “No matter what you do, the result
will be the same,” his way of lightly covering up the “you get fucked”
punchline. Watch this video to see the German chancellor cringe.

Trump marked his first moments in office by wielding power
vengefully: the head of the D.C. National Guard lost his job at noon,
and between festivities the new president signed an executive order to
begin undoing his predecessor’s singular achievement, the Affordable
Care Act. He swept the White House website clean of substantive content
on climate policy, civil rights, health care, and LGBT rights, took down
the Spanish-language site, and added a biography of his wife that
advertises her mail-order jewelry line. At the same time, as Trump moved
through the day, he repeatedly turned his back on his wife. He
immediately degraded the look of the oval office by hanging gold drapes...

Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov has theorized that the Soviet
totalitarian system, which ruled through violence and fear, created a
society in which all initiative was suppressed, personal and
professional growth was all but impossible, and the entire society
became stagnant. As a result, the word “elite” became a misnomer in
Russian: the people with the greatest access to money and power did not
perform the traditional tasks of setting priorities, tastes, and the
agenda for progress. In the absence of social mobility, there was no
aspiration. In addition, because there was no mechanism for transfer of
power and the powerful were forever frightened of losing it, the country
became a gerontocracy, but also something else too: a kakistocracy.

The rule of the worst seemed to become a thing of the past
in the 1990s, but under Putin mediocrity returned with a vengeance. Not
only did the media come under the control of the Kremlin but it acquired
an amateurish quality. Not only did the government start lying, but did
so in dull, simple, and unimaginative language. Putin’s government is
filled with people who plagiarized their dissertations—as did Putin
himself. The ministers are subliterate. The minister of culture, who has
a doctorate in history, regularly exposes his ignorance of history;
indeed, Trump might be tempted to plagiarize the minister’s
dissertation, which begins with the assertion that the criterion of
truth in history is determined solely by the national interests of
Russia—if it’s good for the country, it must be true (much of the rest
of the dissertation is itself plagiarized). Other ministers provide the
differently minded Russian blogosphere with endless hours of fun because
they use words the meaning of which they clearly don’t know, or ones
that don’t exist—as when a newly chosen education minister invented a
word that seemed to mean that she had been appointed to the cabinet by
God. They also make ignorant, repressive, inhumane policy. But their
daily subversion of integrity and principle is indeed aesthetic in
nature. And it serves a purpose: by degrading language and discrediting
the spectacle of politics the Russian government is destroying the
public sphere.

Sometimes vastly different processes yield surprisingly
similar results. Trump is staging an assault on America’s senses that
feels familiar to me—not because he admires Putin (though he does) or
because he is Putin’s puppet, but because they seem to be genuinely
kindred spirits. It might take a long time to understand why we have
come to enter the age of a kakistocracy, but evidently we have.